Read time: 5-10 min
TLDR:
- Not as difficult as expected…just time consuming
- Allow yourself a whole day or half a day to do the in-person visa application
- If applying for the first time, you may need additional documentation like a birth certificate and your parents’ passports
Preamble:
Hello Readers,
I’m in Hong Kong! …and currently applying for my first real visa application. I did apply for a visa to enter Turkey a few months back, but that was a super easy process. Apply online, fill in some simple details, pay some money and boom! Online visa application instantly approved.
Applying for a visa to enter China?
…Well that’s another story.
Background:
I was kindly invited by my new friend Ching Kan to go visit her home town of Chaozhou in China. (We met while volunteering at the last Vipassana retreat and she reminds me so much of my grandmother. She can cook anything and is incredibly funny. She speaks no English and I barely speak any Cantonese, but we manage to communicate. She also hilariously has me in her phone not as Tracy, but as “加拿大” which translates to “Canada”).
Anyway, I didn’t know it at the time, but when I told my grandmother I was going to Chaozhou, she said she actually lived there for 5 years and my grandfather was born there! Such a coincidence…I think Ching kan and I were meant to meet. Now as excited as I was to visit Chaozhou, it also filled me with a bit of dread…a visa application. I’d managed to avoid the visa application last time because I used China as a transit country, but this time it was unavoidable. Chaozhou isn’t part of an area I could transit through thus I had to knuckle down and do the visa application.
Related: Travel Tip #1: How to Get into China Visa-Free – the 144 Hour Rule!
The Mental Hurdle:
One thing I’ve learned from my meditation practice is that most of my stress is in my head. The thoughts of “oh this is going to be hard”, “ugh…I don’t want to” etc etc., are mostly what cause me to feel and be miserable rather than the process itself. With more meditation, I’m also a lot better now at not getting so caught up in the swirling brain thoughts and physical feeling of dread which significantly improves the whole experience. The visa process becomes so objective and I can just take it as something that I must do. Yay! Stress level = only 10%!
The Paperwork:
Now that I’m learning how to better get out of my head, I’ve realized that most things are actually much less hassle than expected. Go figure right?
The application was one of those things. It took me about 1-2 hours filling in the information with the longest time spent being looking up the dates of the places I worked in the past 5 years. Luckily I had the documentation of my pay stubs easily accessible from my YNAB account so that was easier.
That was probably the most challenging part of the information section of the application though I do want to mention that there is no online application available. At the time of writing this (May 9th/24), I could only fill in the application online then print it. Also, it requires a photo to be uploaded on the application in addition to having a physical copy. I used the app called passport photo editor which honestly was amazing. It has a built-in background remover which helped me insert a white background instead of having to find a white wall. Free with ads.
The Application:
It definitely wasn’t a complicated process, but wow was I ever exhausted and hungry afterwards. There were a lot of steps to go through especially since I didn’t have a printer where I was staying. Here’s a table which hopefully breaks some of it down:
| Item: | Note: |
| To Bring to the Visa Center | 1) Passport (with >6 month validity and >2 blank visa pages) 2) Application Form (with pages signed) 3) Hong Kong Landing Slip 4) Hotel reservation (or invitation) 5) Roundtrip tickets 6) Octopus card and Cash* *printing machine only used the Octopus card and payment could only be made with a HK debit card or cash |
| Items to have printed/physical copies | 1) Application form 2) Passport photos (taken within 6 months) 3) Copy of hotel reservation or printed invitation 4) Copy of roundtrip train or plane tickets |
After a lot of queuing and 3 different checkpoints, this is where it would have ended for the average tourist in HK going to China, but I knew there was a bit of a problem when they asked me questions like “wait…your parents aren’t Hong Kong citizens, but they’re actually Canadian?”
Additional Required Documents:
Turns out that because I had never applied for a China Visa before, they needed more documents. They were super kind about it though and said that if I could get the papers quickly, I wouldn’t need to queue again (Yay!).
Additional Documents:
- A copy of my birth certificate
- A copy of my parents’ passports
- A copy of my parents’ passports at the time of my birth
Hahahaha! Right…there was no way my parents would have the last one because the Canadian government no longer lets us keep our old passports. Luckily the worker said that proof of Canadian citizenship at the time of my birth was fine. After I printed the additional documents, she quickly reviewed the papers and gave me a slip to pay for the application ($700HKD ~$125CAD).
(Dear Mom and Dad, how you managed to both be home, find and email me those documents all within 40 minutes is beyond me. You are superstars)
My takeaways from this visa application:
Everything is definitely hardest the first time it’s done, so let me give you my takeaways:
| Tip/Comment: | Why? |
| Paperwork: allow ~2 hours | it’s long…if you rush and make a mistake then it could be rejected |
| Allow a 1/2 day or full day to apply in person | The queues can be long and, if they ask for additional documents, it’s much easier to give it to them on the same day rather than queuing again the following day |
| Make a list of things to do at the visa center | Maybe more for ADHDers, but having a list of all that I needed to print or questions I needed to ask was really helpful (E.g. Printables: passport photo, application, landing slip) |
| Print everything before you arrive | Expensive and queue was long to use the computer. A couple of individuals were filling in their application at the center and there were only 4 computers *facepalm* (Printing costs for passport photo and papers ~$50 CAD) |
| …Bring snacks | …it was a long wait |
Definitely not as bad as expected and hopefully all goes well and I can go to Chaozhou next week. Here’s to hoping your visa application is smooth sailing.
Happy travelling!
Tracy
World of Wandering Minds 